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Does this rom fix the book8088 being randomly off by a column in text mode?


The stock book8088 BIOS is a ripoff (GPL violation) of this. IDK about that bug though.


Didn't they notify buyers of the open source bios and share the code if a buyer wanted it? That may be enough to satisfy the GPL.


IDK what notices they provide, but:

The copyright statement that prints on boot and indicates that it is licensed under the GPL has been stripped, violating section 4 and 5.d (now claims to be "Copyright (C) 2022 CYCLE Logic" with no mention of "Copyright (C) 2010 - 2020 Sergey Kiselev", and with no mention of the GPL).

If you do request the source code from them, to their credit they do give it to you, but they code the give you has all (edit: most) of the copyright header-comments removed (violation of section 5.b).

And generally, in neither the binary nor the source code indicate that it's based on book8088 (violation of section 5.a).


That's so silly.

They'd definitely sell more, not less, of these book8088s if they credited the bios and used upstream's source.

Particularly now that upstream directly supports the device.


No :) Its Chinese open source, Bunnie calls it Gongkai https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297 You copy, rip out attribution, add some optional modifications and sell it as your own.


When you buy it they send you an archive that has the schematics for the machine, and a zip file that contains the source code to the rom with whatever modifications they made.


Could you explain that in a little more detail? That sounds like it could be a hardware bug.


I believe it's from the LCD panel auto-syncing improperly / choosing the wrong horizontal porch.

I'm not sure the BIOS can help much.


In that case I think any firmware fix would need to be in the VBIOS.


There's no real vbios. There's a CGA chip (6845), with pretty limited registers to adjust timings (and a lot of software out there that expects to set these directly or for line timings and frame timings to be precisely known values). The clock rate is fixed.

The scan converter in panels often guesses "wrong" about modes. If one could change the firmware for it, that would help.




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